Painting (Painting)

Something To Do With Being Held by Jordan Ann Craig is inspired by a Cheyenne bead bag. Intrigued by the two shades of blue used for the source object (a deep dusty blue and a bold vivid cobalt blue) the artist replicated these shades in her painting. Craig then added in her own colors, including the pink-orange hues, to achieve a bold but soft quality about the work, as she states that she intended the work to convey vulnerability.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dreaming of the dream of the dream is a 16mm projection consisting of images of waves that come and go continuously. The artist has assembled extracts of cartoons in which water is visible (the sea, bubbles, a stream, waves, etc.). Somewhat nostalgic, these extracts can recall either childhood cartoons or paintings by Hokusai.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Eclipse is a series of screenprints from Jordan Kantor’s larger vitrine installation that included reworkings of a single image of a small group viewing an eclipse through shielding cut-outs. Printed on a clear surface, the work plays with ideas of obstruction and viewing, connecting spectacular natural phenomena with contemporary art making.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009. Included in the Kadist Collection, these works continue to explore the ontology of the image to investigate the relationship between painting, photography, and a new time-based variable: film. Reduced here to the essential function of recording the exposure of light through the apparatus of a lens, Kantor then translated these film stills into painted colored canvases that retain the 3:4 aspect ratio of the 16mm film as well as the exact size of the projected image.

Painting (Painting)

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009. Included in the Kadist Collection, these works continue to explore the ontology of the image to investigate the relationship between painting, photography, and a new time-based variable: film. Reduced here to the essential function of recording the exposure of light through the apparatus of a lens, Kantor then translated these film stills into painted colored canvases that retain the 3:4 aspect ratio of the 16mm film as well as the exact size of the projected image.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (violet)

Photography (Photography)

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

Photography (Photography)

The Caste Portraits Series by Leah Gordon investigates the practice of grading skin color from black to white, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century Haiti. Médéric Moreau de St Mery (1750-1819), a French créole slave owner and freemason living in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), created a taxonomy of race classifying skin color from black to white using names derived from mythology, natural history, and bestial miscegenation. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789) hierarchizes 128 possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé).

Photography (Photography)

San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Photography (Photography)

Washington D. C. Constitution Ave. is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image, a woman and a child walk along Constitutional Avenue as a surveillance camera on the street post directs its gaze towards them. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke was shot in the American Southwest at Mid-century modern architectural structures that were built to house regional independent banks and have since been bought up by Chase, Bank of America, and TD Bank. The video utilizes transparency and opacity effects in multimedia software to question the perceptibility of finance. It offers a complex metaphor (toxic assets, emergency flares, house/mortgage on fire) about the financial sector and the effects of the ‘crisis’ that led to the disappearance (and the ghostly memory) of many local and regional banks.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (Boom Box, Double-Sided) by Mary Ann Aitken is representational painting of a boom box on an unconventionally long canvas painted on both sides, to mimic the scale and appearance of the actual appliance. Known for going against trends, Aitken often favored dimensions, such as the square, that were otherwise considered out of style in contemporary painting. In this double-sided painting, one side depicts the titular boombox set up—a boxy cassette player, flanked by a pair of stereo speakers in front of wood panelling.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (Diptych) by Mary Ann Aitken is a pair of paintings; one entirely abstract and the other a hybrid of representational and abstract elements. The left-side painting is a cacaphonous all over composition of brushstrokes layered in the artist’s signature primary colors. In the same color scheme, the right-side painting portrays a still life with an arrangement of flowers as its focal point, with marks and splatter spilling from the left-side composition into the right.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ana Navas uses humor to address formal, aesthetic, and societal conventions that are interwoven in the everyday through the normalization of gendered behaviors and style choices used to project personal and collective signifiers. In her Donation Vases she uses quotes taken from corporate coach Lois P. Frankel’s book Nice girls (still) don’t get the corner office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (2004). The aspirational, somewhat cynical tone of the sentences – “When given a choice, sit next to most powerful person, their power will cascade over you,” “Why is it that women buy those little chains to hang reading glasses around their necks,” “If you see your reflection on a glossy surface & notice something wrong, avoid fixing it there” – reveals a particular understanding of what a professional, ambitious cis woman should look like, the persona she should project, and the type of desirable behaviors that constitute a stereotypical “successful woman” according to a capitalist morality.

Photography (Photography)

Lynelle on my bed, NYC

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“School of the seven Bells (SOTSB)” is based on a series of hands games in which an object is passed from hand to hand. The performance is a reference to the film by Robert Bresson, “Pickpocket”, where a group of pickpocketers play with their victims. The artwork, through the actions of the hands, is an interrogation into space and time, questioning the relationship between public and private space, the establishment of communication through the body and visual exchange and gestures between aggression and sensuality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Anne Imhof’s video work Untitled (Wave) creates resonances between the feminine, adoration, and immateriality, while also referring to the history of art and aesthetics, in particular the concept of the sublime. Starring Imhof’s partner and collaborator Eliza Douglas, the film depicts a woman, naked from the waist up, dressed simply in tracksuit trousers, long black hair, feet dipped in the ocean water. The woman bears a long whip, while she looks out at the horizon and the waves lick at her bare feet.

Photography (Photography)

Brian on the Phone, NYC

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Perspective was filmed during a residence in northern Poland. The film is preceded by a series of photographs made ? ?in her studio.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Há Terra! (There Is Land!) is a short film by Ana Vaz that picks up on the artist’s previous film A Idade da Pedra (2013), in which Vaz imagined premodernity in her native Brazil.

Painting (Painting)

In the painting called “The Consciousness of Memory, Time, and Guilt” as in many of her recent works, the body is fragmented. The brain, the ear, the eyes, these body parts that put us in relation with the other and link the visible to the invisible, remain isolated. Whereas the skulls are joined by lines evoking rivers.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Anne Samat’s Puteri 3 references Ulek Mayang, a classical Malay dance, performed in a ritualistic pre-Islamic context. It is based on the myth of a princess from the sea who steals the soul of a fisherman she falls in love with, leaving his body lifeless. A battle ensues for the soul of the fisherman, between a shaman (bomoh) trying to bring back the spirit into the earthly flesh and the princess aided by five of her sisters.